Feedster Support

This blog site is designed to answer questions about Feedster emailed to feedstersupport @ feedster.com.

Monday, November 01, 2004

There are way too many stop words on Feedster.

There are waaaaaaaaaaaay too many stop words on Feedster. Wonder? > Done? Unfortunately? I could understand articles and some > prepositions, and perhaps forms of "to be" but anything else just > kills Feedster's usefulness to me. Here's why:>> I do lexical research for the dictionaries I write. Part of that > involves looking for examples of terms in the wild. This, by > necessity, depends upon exact phrase searching. I've resigned myself > to the fact that most search engines suck, that Google indexes only a > small fraction of weblogs, and that some words are destined to be stop > words. (The only full-text resource I know of which has no stop words > is Factiva.) Feedster and other blog indexers take care of some of > Google's shortcomings, I use a variety of search engines to make sure > I get a better sample of what can reasonably be called "the web" (as > opposed to non-web resources which have a web interface but are not > indexable or searchable except through their usually crappy interfaces).>> But because of Feedster's stop words, I also have to go to Blogdigger, > or PubSub, or Technorati. Each of these, like Feedster, come up short > in some way. If Feedster could cut the stop words to about 12, if it > would do real phrase searching every time (even if it means > wildcarding stop words, but otherwise retaining the phrase intact, if > it would actually allow me to see all pages of results, I might be > able to skip the other blog indexers.>> Thanks, in any case.>> Grant Barrett

Hi Grant,

Wow. What an intelligent email. Thank you. I've taken the liberty of
forwarding it in full to our indexer guru and he and I will be
discussing it later today.

Guys, you seriously need to rewrite your instructions on claiming a feed.

> Guys, you seriously need to rewrite your instructions on claiming a feed.>> First of all, I don't know what claiming a feed means.>> Second of all, I follow your instructions literally (to my knowledge) > and I have no idea if the end result is successful or not.>> But I think your search engine is cool and useful.>> Right now, all I would like to do is add my picture and email to your > search listing whenever someone uses your search engine to access my > blog postings.>> thanks.>> Steve Castellano

The default sort order for Feedster is date sorted, most recent blog posts 1st. And the problem when you search for "Tool Orders" is that there are lots of other blogs that have those terms. So if you search for text that only you have you're more likely to find your blog.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

RSS Feeds of ONLY MP3 Content

Hi,

I primarily use rss feeds on my mp3 player (audiofeeds/podcasts). Is there a way to
refine a search to encapsulated mp3 content only? If so, and I've missed this
capability, please forgive. Otherwise, please consider this for your feature list.

Thanks

Answer:
We sort of have this and sort of don't (the don't is that there's a bug).

There's a partial implementation of this on http://feedster.tv/ and there is an
enclosures feed of only MP3 content at: